Many SMBs (Small and medium businesses) struggle with the decision of how best to support their businesses technology journey. Without the ability to hire a team of IT professionals you are left with the option of hiring the best generalist you can get or outsourcing your IT to a Managed IT support partner.

In this article we weigh up both approaches to help you decide the best route for you.

In-house route

Many organisations choose to hire in an IT Manager to run the technology in the business, look after the infrastructure, licensing, applications, hardware, cyber security and many more areas. As you can see this is quite a lot of different areas of expertise.

The average salary of an IT manager in the UK according to Glassdoor is £51,000. When you take into consideration the total cost of that employee when considering employee benefits, national insurance, bonuses etc this number is between 1.25 and 1.5 times the salary, leaving you with an overall cost between £63,000 – £76,500 per annum.

As touched on this approach does come with some risks, including:

  • No support when your IT Manager is on holiday or off sick. Roughly 10-15% of the working year.
  • You open up your organisation to knowledge gaps and limited escalation. If you happen to find an issue that your IT Manager cannot solve then you are left with limited options or a much longer resolution time.
  • Sometimes the projects needed to push forward your technology strategy get put on the back burner as maintenance and day to day firefighting takes over.

Outsourcing route

An alternative route that you could consider is to outsource your IT to a Managed IT provider. Meaning you have no internal IT team yourself but use a partner. This is a popular route for many organisations.

From a good Managed IT partner, you will get a clear route for raising tickets and issues and a fully staffed helpdesk. As the partner will likely have many Managed IT customers, they can allocate a wide range of fully accredited employees with a variety of skill sets to make sure they are better able to answer any queries that come in. Many of these partners also have enhanced relationships with technology providers such as Microsoft to better escalate any issues.

A good Managed IT partner is more than just a help desk, they should be helping you meet your business goals and understand the role technology can play to meet them. With a good partner, you will also get annual consultancy and project days to help on any range of areas to improve your business.

Benefits of selecting a Managed IT provider

As long as the annual cost of these services are lower or comparable to the cost of hiring an internal resource then you could easily see how it could take away some of the risks within your business while providing a more complete service.

The benefits of selecting a Managed IT support partner include:

  • Helpdesk available for every working day not just 85-90%.
  • Wide range of available resources to deal with any technology issue facing your company
  • Low risk as you normally get a guaranteed response time and resolve time based on different banding of issues.
  • Enhanced escalation via premium support agreements with major tech providers.

On first glance hiring an internal resource appears better, but in reality without a team of IT professionals supporting you, a Managed IT partner in most cases is not only more affordable but a better choice. Less risk, better issue resolution and access to a wide range of resources to carry out IT projects.

If you would like to understand how Bridgeall’s Managed IT services could better support your business,  contact us today.